entertainment
Stylist’s entertainment director Helen Bownass on the best films, TV and music to feast on this month
FILM: the strays
It might be unusual to begin a film review focused on the ending, but the final 25 minutes of new Netflix thriller were the), who has secretly reinvented herself from difficult circumstances. She hides her Blackness under wigs and changes the way she talks in order to ‘fit’ in with the wealthy white people around her. As her son Sebastian says: “She thinks she’s white. Anything Black is off limits.” Life has a shiny veneer – also emphasised by the film’s hyper-real, stylised version of English suburbia – until two shadowy figures from her past turn up and send Neve’s new carefully constructed world spiralling. If it sounds like I’m being deliberately evasive, I am! The plot has been closely guarded, and I want you to experience Nathaniel Martello-White’s remarkable directorial debut like I did: with no idea of where it’s going and getting completely sucked in – and freaked out. , which also stars Bafta award-winning Bukky Bakray, feels like several genres rolled into one – in a good way. It’s a horror with echoes of Jordan Peele, it’s a teen coming-of-age story and it’s a tale of revenge and retribution. All that in just 99, very anxious, minutes.
